we’ve taken public, we started off with virtually no dividend protection at all and then
grew the revenues in such a way that, over
time, the dividends had some protection.

“When we took STORE public in 2014,the dividend was very highly protected,” hecontinues. “Today, it’s even more so, andwe’ve done that while increasing the divi-dend 16% over the past couple of years.”The result: greater revenue growth forSTORE shareholders than in any of Volk’sprior vehicles, including Spirit Finance.“Again, you have to set it up from day one; ittakes years to be able to see reap fruits.”More so than in any of Volk’s previousorganizations, STORE focuses squarely onprofit center real estate, and also puts aneven greater emphasis on directly contact-ing potential tenants. “We have more rela-tionship managers here than at any com-pany we’ve ever run,” he says. “We’ve reallyput the focus on our sense of outreach.”If its employee base has grown in someareas, it’s also been reduced in others. “Weoutsource things that we used to do inter-nally,” says Volk. “Today we run STOREwith about 70 employees out of Scottsdale,AZ”—and that for an investment portfolioof about 1,750 properties across 48 states.

“In prior companies with this asset base,
we might have had 200 employees. So
we’ve learned to run the company much
more efficiently in that sense,” Volk says.

Greg Murphy’s 17 years with Natixis havebeen times of expansion—and contraction.In fact, expansion followed by contractionfollowed by a rebound to his group’s pre-contraction size. “When I first joined, thereal estate team consisted of 16 or 17 peo-ple,” recalls the New York City-based man-aging director. “It was a new business forNatixis, in its formative stages. At our peakwe had about 55 people. After the 2008financial crisis we shrunk to 18 or 20, andnow we’re back up to about 50 people com-prising the real estate finance group.”He charts the different types of financ-ing a Natixis client might seek at differentstages of a property’s life cycle. “If one ofour important clients is buying a parcel of

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